The site takes its name from an old forest recorded on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as "Crooked Wood", though no trace of those trees remains. What does remain, invisible to anyone walking the grass, is readable only through cropmarks, the faint differential growth patterns that form in cereal crops or grass when buried features below the soil affect moisture and nutrient levels differently from undisturbed ground. It is a technique that has transformed how archaeologists understand the Irish landscape, and this particular field rewards that aerial perspective generously.

An aerial photograph taken by Leo Swan captures several distinct cropmarks scattered across the former woodland. In the north-east corner, a linear earthwork suggests the course of an old roadway. Moving south into the eastern side of the field, a large rectangular earthwork appears. More compelling still, roughly in the southern centre of the field, is the cropmark of a circular enclosure with a D-shaped annexe attached to its southern side. This formation is consistent with a levelled ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onwards, where a circular bank and ditch would have defined a domestic and agricultural space. The annexe, a secondary enclosure attached to the main ring, is a feature found at a number of ringfort sites and may have served for livestock. Further west, a curving ditch runs northward towards another large circular cropmark in the north-west corner of the field, suggesting that the buried archaeology here is both extensive and varied. The reference to Manning (1985) places this observation within a body of regional fieldwork carried out in the 1980s, when aerial survey was beginning to systematically reveal just how densely settled the Irish midlands once were.